For many of his 20 years at Epic Games, Cliff Bleszinski served as the face of the company. The design director was one of the creators of the Gears of War franchise, which has sold over $1 billion worth of games over the past decade.
Before leaving Epic last year, Bleszinski was working with multiple teams at Epic, helping with games like Bulletstorm, Infinity Blade, Gears of War Judgment and the upcoming Fortnite.
These days, Bleszinski is splitting time between his home in Raleigh and his North Carolina beach house. He made his first public appearances post-Epic at SXSW in Austin and PAX East in Boston this year. Now he’s set to provide a keynote for the growing East Coast Games Conference (ECGC) Wednesday afternoon in Raleigh.
I caught up with Bleszinski, who was enjoying the first warm beach weather at the season, to talk about the continued growth of game studios in the Triangle. He explains why he’s staying in Raleigh and what the future holds for him in this exclusive interview.
How have you seen the awareness of the East Coast Games Conference grow over the years within the industry?
When I first heard about the conference I kind of wrote it off because I thought they were doing it because of tax incentives and things like that, but the more I thought about it I realized my long-term plans. If I start a studio I will start it in North Carolina. And there’s tax reasons.
We’ve discussed why Raleigh is such a great place to live (in past interviews). People get so hung up on the West Coast. Don’t get me wrong, the West Coast is beautiful. LA and the Bay area have a lot to offer.
But I’d rather be in an emerging area where if you pay a programmer a good salary they can like a king, or you can live the simple life and enjoy our version of the bar scene or you could have a family and appreciate the great schools in the area, all the great medical care, and the fact that you can buy an amazing house for $300,000 out here.
Show me a place on the West Coast that you’d want to live at that you can do that in. It’s pretty rare.
What are your thoughts on the Triangle gaming scene?
I would love for the Triangle to become a great hub for gaming. The bubble kind of burst a little bit, but I think it’s coming back. Epic will keep kicking butt. And if I start something up I want to do it here because this place wasn’t always my home, but I’ve come to call it my home.
What are you going to talk about in your keynote?
For my keynote I was planning on doing a repeat performance of my PAX East talk, which was basically an outline of what video games have meant for me my entire life.
Walking through how they were there for me in seventh grade when I had a tough time with bullies to finding my wife who is the love of my life to the death of my father.
As it the conference approaches, I realize I’m going to modify it a little bit and specialize it more to North Carolina and what video games mean not only for myself but also for the local area.
This is the south and some people have concerns about the south, but this isn’t your grandfather’s rebel flag south. This is the new south and I’ll talk about how I believe it’s going to evolve into ultimately a burgeoning video game hub.
When it comes to the development community here, how have you seen it grow post bubble with Insomniac and a lot of mobile game companies?
That’s the key right now. I think “AAA” is what it is. People are very scared to spend $50 to $100 million on a project. But now more than ever you can pick a team of six guys and make potentially a great or a breakout product on Steam or on IOS or on Android. We had six guys leave Epic a month before I left and I’ve remained friends with them and they’ve done fairly well (Bitmonster Games). They’re releasing iOS games and looking at what they’re doing next.
They have their own little office space above one of my favorite restaurants downtown. We’re in this era of the indie game scene taking over. It really feels that things have slipped a lot and as much as people are always going to want to shoot people in the face in a shooter that costs $200 million to make and market, they’re also more than ever willing to play indie games. It used to be this outside thing but now it’s really becoming mainstream. I think Sony more than anybody right now really recognizes this by signing all these other independent game developers.
We’re entering this era where we can render anything, but people can also choose to make any sort of gameplay experience now that they want to, big or small.
What role do you see Unreal Engine 4 technology playing in helping independent developers make games, especially with the free Unreal Development Kit?
I think Epic’s biggest problem – and I don’t work there anymore, so I can kind of be free of that. They used to have a problem that the Unreal Engine was perceived as the Ferrari or the Lamborghini of engines, where Unity came along and they were pre-hipster before it was cool to be. They were like, “Oh, if a few guys get together we’ll just slap something together in Unity.”
I think with Unreal Engine 4 their goal is to not only hit the high end in regards to AAA, $100 million productions, but also to get back to that kid in the garage. If I decide to make a new project I’ll actually be back in the trenches using Epic’s super simple scripting language to link things together. It’s not that programmers will be irrelevant, because they never will be. But people are going to be able to iterate faster, which is what the goal had always been over there.
Looking at the latest demos, it’s something they’re on the track to have in the middleware groups not only in the AAA space, but also the indie space, which is a smart strategy for Epic to have.
[EPIC GAMES ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of Epic stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]
